By the time this gets posted, I’m probably going to be upstairs in my room at home, huddled over my familiar keyboard, having recovered from the 90 minute braindump the kids are going to unleash on me the moment I walk in the door. Either that, or they’ll look briefly up from their books, say “Hi dad”, and resume reading. Any given trip, it’s an even bet.

Haven’t been posting because, for mysterious reasons, my wireless connection at the house in Paris suddenly stopped working for me. Okay, not so mysterious – S only has a wired line, so I was surfing off of a connection from someone else in the building. Maybe they got tired of seeing some machine that wasn’t theirs registered on their network. Maybe their router crashed and they just didn’t notice. But the wireless went belly up, and while there was the home machine and plenty of internet cafes, I tend to be paranoid about typing passwords on any machines but my own. So no posts, sorry. Also no backlog of illuminating stories of my past few days, written off the cuff and stored in anticipating of being able to share once I had my connectivity back. What can I say? I’m lazy.

But I’m westbound now, somewhere over Nebraska, I think, enroute to my connection in SLC. France has seen the back of me yet another time, and we’ve both survived not much worse for the wear. I’m not going to try for a full recap, of the missing days – suffice it to say that Friday was a roadtrip w/S up to Normandy and Deauville; Saturday was, by and large, recovering from Friday. More food. Some solo exploration on foot Saturday afternoon, walking the Seine from the Trocadero (obligatore Eiffel Tower shots) to Ile de Cygne (getting some photos of the Statue of Liberty’s “mini me”) and back to Muette. Enough psychic energy to fit in again, talking to random street vendors. Then more food. And packing.

God – the sheer engineering involved in getting this pressurized metal tube a third of the way around the world non-stop; it still staggers me. When I got on this plane ten hours ago, we were in Paris. I’ve sat here, slept, watched a couple of movies on the laptop, eaten a couple of meals, and all the while we’ve been turbines a-spinning, GPS a-pinging, in a single leap around an appreciable fraction of all the globe mankind has ever known. And, witness of technological wonders notwithstanding, I’m as ready as hell to get off this plane.